The Six Rules of Maybe

focused. Mrs. Martinelli called out something to him from the garage, and then they began hauling out armloads of stuff to the now upright tables—crystal dishes and old suits, blocky clock radios and record albums, a TV that looked heavy enough to anchor a ship.
    They both disappeared inside the house, and then there they were again, struggling to get a large wood bed frame out the door. Mr. Martinelli was sweating.
    “Slow down, sugar,” Mrs. Martinelli said. She could bite when she wanted to—I’d heard her snip and nag at him over the years, in ways that made you feel bad for him. But her words were patient this time. Cheerful, even.
    “Do you need some help?” I called. I could just see them both having a heart attack right there. I tried to remember how many times you were supposed to compress the chest and how many times you were supposed to blow into the mouth. “Just a sec.” I jogged over.
    Mr. Martinelli puffed air out of his cheeks. “It’s not that heavy, sweet pea,” he said to Mrs. Martinelli. But he looked relieved to set it down.
    “You always were my muscle man,” she said to him.
    I lifted Mrs. Martinelli’s end easily. “What is it?” I asked.
    “Our old water bed,” Mr. Martinelli said. “Set it by the curb. This oughta draw the folks in.”
    “What are you guys doing?”
    “A little housecleaning,” Mrs. Martinelli said.
    “A little housecleaning,” Mr. Martinelli repeated.
    They looked guilty. I couldn’t figure out why, unless they’d just held up a Saint Vincent de Paul truck. I poked around a Tupperware container of old-guy tools and a dish of necklaces. A stained-glass lamp, a fondue pot, macramé plant hangers, saucepans …
    “Hey, you guys had this in there.” I held it up. I think it was a picture of their grandkids. One of those creepy, stiff images of two kids sitting at an angle against a blue photographer’s backdrop. The little boy wore a plaid tie and a navy blue vest; the little girl had a matching plaid dress. “Probably don’t want to get rid of this, right?”
    “Someone might want the frame,” Mrs. Martinelli said.
    “Two bucks,” Mr. Martinelli offered.
    “No thanks,” I said. We had our own relatives.
    “Cute kids, though,” Mrs. Martinelli said. She hunched over a table with a fat marker in her plump hand.
    I set the picture down. I was poking through a dish of groovy old-lady earrings when I heard the slow squeal of bike brakes behind me.
    “Hey.”
    I turned. “Oh!” Straddling his bike, right there, was Jesse Waters, Shy, on my own street on my own Saturday morning. Nicole was going to be pissed. He shook his dark hair out of his eyes.
    “I was just riding around,” he said. “Okay, that’s probably pretty obvious, since, you know, I’m on a bike… .”
    I did a mental inventory of how stupid I might possibly look. Since Juliet and I were about to take the ferry into the city, I had reasonable clothes on. Makeup, check; teeth brushed, okay; all was pretty well. “Do you live around here?”
    “Not too far,” he said. “I saw the signs.” He pointed. I looked in the direction of his finger. Whoa—I don’t know how I’d missed them. Signs were on the telephone poles and streetlights, goingdown the street and heading around the corner. GARAGE SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO! Red paint on pieces of thin cardboard.
    “Those look like cereal boxes,” I said.
    “Yep,” he said. “One fell off a telephone pole two streets over. Frosted Mini-Wheats.”
    “Mr. Martinelli’s favorite,” Mrs. Martinelli said. She was listening in.
    “What?” Mr. Martinelli shouted from the garage.
    “FROSTED MINI-WHEATS!” she shouted back to him.
    “I thought maybe you were the garage sale,” Jesse said. He got off his bike, laid it down.
    “Nope. Not us. We’re sale-less.” I gestured over to our driveway, which was empty except for Hayden’s truck and the Neilsons’ cat lurking around its tires.
    But I’d caught what he’d just said. He knew where I lived. I knew what that meant. I was only pretending not to know what that meant to buy myself a little time to figure out how I felt about what that meant. And how did I feel? Well, I wasn’t so sure, but I picked up one of Mr. Martinelli’s cuff links anyway. It was very large and silver and had a fat chunk of turquoise in its center.
    “This would be nice for you,” I said.
    “If there was only a tie clip to match.” He grinned.
    “Two dollars,” Mr. Martinelli said. He